How to escape a pipe (|) in my vimrc

Question

I've seen

• How to escape pipe character in `:make`, `:grep` and friends
• How to escape pipe (|) in mapped substitution?
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29596150/use-to-diplay-tabs-in-vim

But none of them solved my problem

I'm trying to set my listchars in my vimrc like this:

set listchars=tab:|

But I got the error: E474: Invalid argument: listchars=tab:

I tried escaping the pipe as \| and ^V| and \\| and a bunch of variations, but nothing worked.

The weird thing is that I can do other stuff (like nnoremap \|) with no problems at all. The only problem is for listchars.

Answer 1

Read :h 'lcs': "Two or three characters to be used to show a tab". First, the first one. Then the second one repeated as many times as needed.

set lcs=tab:\|\|